


Harder This Time

by anxiousgoat



Series: And Afterwards, They Talked [2]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Angst, Boundaries, Communication, F/M, Fluff, Ginny needs a hug, Harry Needs a Hug, Harry Potter Epilogue Compliant, Hurt/Comfort, Post-Canon, Romance, and JK is not welcome in this house, it's not mentioned in the story but Ginny is a radiant trans girl
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-02
Updated: 2020-10-02
Packaged: 2021-03-07 16:55:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,064
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26781007
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anxiousgoat/pseuds/anxiousgoat
Summary: The first time they got together, Ginny and Harry simply snogged each other's faces off and that was it. This time things have changed and they're going to have to work a little bit harder. They can do it though.
Relationships: Harry Potter/Ginny Weasley
Series: And Afterwards, They Talked [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1729894
Comments: 5
Kudos: 14





	Harder This Time

I’m lying in the orchard under the dappled shade of an old pear tree, my eyes closed and my skin warmed by the late June sun. This is a good place to think. To process things, all the things that have happened. Some days it hurts so much I think I can’t survive it, and other days I feel strangely at peace, happy even. Today is one of those days.

“Hey, Ginny.”

Harry’s voice is quiet. I know instantly what he’s here for.

“Hey.” I open my eyes and sit up, cross legged in the lengthy grass. “Have a seat.”

He sits with his legs stretched out in front of him, long and skinny, and looks at me. There’s a little crease between his eyebrows which has been there almost permanently since we won the battle at Hogwarts. It’s been a rough time for him. Everybody wants him to go to the funerals and memorials, and he feels that he should. Hermione and Ron and I, and Mum and Dad, all go to as many as we can too, just to be with him, and we’ve finally managed to persuade him that he doesn’t have to go to every single one, so it’s been a little easier on him the last couple of weeks.

I guess he’s finally feeling as though it’s okay to do this. I almost wish he wasn’t, because I’m going to have to say some harsh things and I hate to hurt him. It can’t be helped, though, I don’t think there is a non-painful way to say them.

“What’s up?” I say, since he hasn’t spoken. He blinks and focuses on me.

“Right. Sorry. I was thinking… obviously you don’t have to, but, well, now that everything’s over, do you want to get back together? With me?”

I can’t help smiling at his awkwardness. This didn’t happen the first time, I just snogged his face off and that was that. It’s going to be much harder this time. I rub my thumb nervously over my upper lip and try to keep my smile natural, but his face falls.

“You don’t?”

“It’s not that I don’t want to,” I say quickly. “Actually, I do, but I need to talk to you first.”

“Is there someone else? It’s fine…”

“No. I mean, I slept with Luna a few times, and Neville once or twice, but nothing serious. No, it’s about us.”

His brow wrinkles anxiously.

“Did I do something?”

I take a deep breath.

“Yes.”

He looks at me like it’s the end of the world. Poor Harry, it so often is the end of the world with him.

“Don’t look at me like that,” I say. “I’m not saying no. It’s not a dealbreaker or something. We just need to talk, yeah?”

There’s a pause, and then he nods uncertainly.

“Okay.”

“The thing is,” I say. “You broke up with me.”

“To keep you safe!” he says defensively.

“I know. I understand that.” I take a moment to try to get my words in order. I don’t want to hurt him, but I need him to understand that what he did wasn’t all right. “But you didn’t give me any choice in the matter.”

He stares at me.

“What?”

“You decided for both of us. You knew that I’d be in more danger if people knew we were together, and we…”

He opens his mouth again.

“Wait,” I say firmly. “Please let me finish first. I want you to understand what I’m saying.”

“I just… fine,” he says. “Carry on.”

“Thanks.” I give him a little smile. “We both know that it was true. There was every chance that the Death Eaters might think I’d know where you were. But you took that information and made a decision without consulting me. You broke up with me. Did it… did it occur to you at all to ask me what I thought?”

Harry sits there, looking as though I’ve whacked him on the head with a hammer. I knew it. He never even considered talking to me about the situation. I don’t say anything, though. I want him to really think about this. I want him to have to say it out loud. At last he meets my eyes.

“No,” he says. “But you wouldn’t have broken up with me if I’d talked about it with you. I had to be the one to do it.”

“Harry, I couldn’t have stopped you from breaking up with me if you’d still wanted to do it. You can’t just stay with someone who’s broken up with you! But no, you’re right. I wouldn’t have wanted to break up, because I love you and I want to be with you, and I don’t happen to think we should have let the war change that. But if we’d talked and you’d decided to still split up that would have been one thing. Although you do realise we could have just pretended not to be togther any more, don’t you?”

Harry scowls and shakes his head.

“It had to be real.”

“You are such a stubborn git,” I inform him. “Why did it have to be real? What difference could it possibly have made?”

“Because!” he says in frustration. “It… it would haven’t been as convincing.”

“It would have been exactly the same and you know it. The difference would have been that we’d made the decision together. The way partners are supposed to when things are about both of them.”

Harry is still frowning.

“Look, Ginny, you were underage.”

“So?”

“So you couldn’t have come with us, you still had the Trace on you.”

“So?”

“So… I…”

He glares at me wordlessly.

“I knew after Dumbledore’s funeral that you’d be going and that I couldn’t come with you because of the Trace. You couldn’t possibly have waited a year for me. But that’s completely separate from you deciding to break up with me without giving me a say despite the fact that it was me you were trying to keep safe. We could have stayed together even though we were apart.”

“Yeah, I guess,” he mutters. “I wanted you to be safe, though.”

“Yes. Safely waiting for you like a good little girl, until you came back from your heroic mission.”

“That’s not how I meant it,” he says, looking stung.

I bite my lip, trying to keep my thoughts straight. I want to argue with him, tell him that it doesn’t matter how he meant it, this is what happened. But I need to make sure I say everything that I’ve planned to say. Everything that’s been festering inside me for the last year. Because if I don’t I’ll just keep resenting him and that wouldn’t be good for either of us.

“You did it again on the day of the battle,” I press on. “I asked you for support. I asked you to understand what I needed, and you sided against me and you were _wrong_ , Harry. You were wrong. If you’d backed me up, Mum and Dad might have let me fight, and instead I had to go behind their backs and yours.”

Tears spring into my eyes at the memory.

“I couldn’t! Everyone underage had to leave!”

“Harry!” Suddenly I’m shouting. “My age is not the point! I get Mum and Dad and even Bill not wanting me to fight, but you? You should have understood! How old was I when we fought at the Ministry? How old was I when Draco Malfoy let Death Eaters into Hogwarts? How old was I when Voldemort… when Tom… when he…?”

My voice is shaking horribly and I have stop to wipe the tears away from my eyes.

“How old was I when Tom possessed me, Harry, and forced me to attack people? Children? And how old were you when you came down into the Chamber and saved me? Of all people, you should have known that my age didn’t matter. My whole family was there, and you and Hermione and Luna and Neville… every single person I love was there and fighting, and I needed to be able to fight alongside them.”

“I…” Harry is looking upset now. I think he understands how I feel about this betrayal much better than the other.

“Harry,” I say quietly. “How would you have felt if all of this, whatever it was you were doing all those months with Ron and Hermione, and the battle… if all of it had happened a year earlier, and nobody would let you fight because you were only sixteen and underage?”

He stares at me for long, long moments, and I look back, hope twisting in my guts. This is something he can understand, I know. Then his mouth quirks up into a brief, crooked smile.

“Well, it’s a lot harder to stop the Chosen One from fighting when he wants to,” he says, and gives a shaky laugh.

The tears, which I’d barely suppressed before, come flooding back to the surface, and I try to wipe them away but they just keep coming. I sense, rather than see or hear, Harry getting to his hands and knees and crawling over to me, sitting down beside me and pulling me into a tight hug. I lean against him as my sobs die away.

“It felt like such a betrayal,” I hiccup. “I felt so small and stupid, like a child. It was humiliating. You treated me like a child who couldn’t be relied upon to make her own decisions. Who couldn’t be trusted with her own… her own life.”

I feel him freeze. He doesn’t speak. I sit up, drawing away from him and mopping my eyes and nose. Harry follows me with his eyes.

“I’m really sorry,” he croaks. “I… that wasn’t what I meant to do. I just wanted you to…”

“Be safe,” I finish for him. “I know, but that wasn’t your decision to make. Do you understand?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I do. I was treating you… like a child. Like only I knew how to make the right decisions for your life. That’s what you meant about when I broke up with you, too, wasn’t it? Oh, fuck.”

I nod, but he’s buried his face in his hands, bent right over into himself, curling up like a hurt child.

“Yeah,” I say uncertainly. “That’s what I meant.”

I don’t know what I’ve said to make him react this way and suddenly I’m a bit scared. I rub his back gently.

“Harry?” I say. “I’m sorry. I didn’t want to upset you. I just… I needed you to know how I felt, that’s all. I know you didn’t mean to hurt me or betray me or anything like that.”

A tremor runs through him and for a moment I’m terrified that I’ve actually made him ill, until he lifts his head and I realise that he’s laughing. Shakily, and with wet eyes, but laughing. I relax slightly, though I carry on rubbing his back.

“Don’t apologise, Ginny,” he says. “You were completely right. You _are_ completely right. I had no idea I was… I’m so sorry. I just… fuck.”

“What?” My hand is still moving in circles on his back, and I think it’s helping. He looks slightly calmer, anyway.

“I just realised I was doing the same… the same thing… it doesn’t matter.”

“Course it matters,” I say, frowning. “Doing the same thing as what? Or who?”

He shakes his head.

“Nah, it’s not important. I just… yeah. I’m really sorry.”

“It _is_ important. You’re upset. Something’s upset you and if it’s upsetting you then it’s important to me. Come on, Harry. Talk to me.”

He swallows hard.

“Okay, I can… yeah. I can… okay.” There’s a pause, and then, all in a rush, he says, “It was Dumbledore.”

“Dumbledore?” I’m completely at sea; I mostly just want to keep him talking. Harry nods, and then shakes his head.

“He was the one who made me stay with the Dursleys, did you know? Apparently your Mum and Dad offered to take me in after Ron and the twins rescued me that time. And after… after the graveyard too.”

“I knew about that one. Heard them talking about it afterwards. They were really angry with Dumbledore for not letting you come to us.”

Harry nods.

“He said I had to stay. He didn’t even tell me why until after Sirius died, and even then…”

He looks at me.

“Even then?” I prompt when he doesn’t continue.

“He said he was telling me everything then. And I… I believed him. He said I had to stay there because my Mum gave me protection when she died to save me, but it would only work if I was living with her blood family. He said it was to keep me safe. I had to stay with them to stay safe. He never gave me any say.” He looks at me and shakes his head again. “And then I did exactly the same thing to you.”

“Hardly exactly the same thing,” I say, more tartly than I’d intended. “You didn’t force me to live with people who abused me for sixteen years. And you did at least tell me why.”

“Yeah, but still,” he says. “It’s deciding for someone else. Making the choices that should be theirs. I’m sorry, Ginny, I really am. I won’t do it again.”

“I know.” I hug him. “You’re forgiven.”

He gives me a small smile.

“Thanks.”

“There’s something else, isn’t there?” He’s awful at hiding his feelings, and although I think he feels better now we’re on the same page about what he did to me, there’s still a shadow in his eyes. He looks at me in surprise.

“I… I guess.”

My arm is still around his waist and I give him a little squeeze.

“Want to tell me?”

“Yeah… can I?”

“I’d like it if you would.”

“Okay. It… it wasn’t just the thing with the Dursleys. Dumbledore said he was telling me everything then, and I believed him, but at the battle, I… Snape gave me some memories when he died, and they were… well. There was a lot of stuff, but Dumbledore had told Snape that he had to give me some information, but Snape couldn’t tell me until the last minute. He made him swear. That’s why I went to Voldemort in the Forest. I had to die before he could be killed.”

I stare at him, aghast.

“You had to… you died?”

“Yeah, Voldemort killed me.”

I have no words. I just look at him, at his tense body, still a little too then, his face, still a bit hollow in the cheeks, his green eyes, staring down at his lap.

“I mean, I came back,” he adds. “Obviously. It was… well, it was a whole thing. I’ll tell you all of it sometime. Soon. But basically there was a bit of his soul in me, ever since he tried to kill me when I was a baby. It had to die before he could die. So when he killed me, he actually killed the bit of his soul that was in me. I mean, I died too, or I could have. But I came back.”

“You came back,” I repeat.

“Yeah.”

I sit there in silence, trying to wrap my brain around it.

“So you had to die, or Dumbledore thought you did, and he made sure you didn’t know until the last possible moment?”

“Yeah.”

“So you couldn’t really do anything else?”

“I’m pretty sure… yeah.”

 _Fucking_ Dumbledore. Merlin’s… purple… throbbing… _dick_. This is so much worse than I could have imagined. This is… I can’t take it all in properly. And Dumbledore, who we were all supposed to trust without question!

“That _cunt_ ,” I say at last.

Harry gives me one startled look and collapses into laughter.

“I mean, he was trying to do what he thought was best. But yeah. He always held things back so that I’d do what he wanted me to. I can see that now. He took every decision about my own life away from me. I… I realised I’d done exactly the same thing when you said that I’d treated you like a child. It was just what I keep thinking about him.”

“Oh my _fucking_ God, Harry. What you did was nothing… _nothing!_ compared with what Dumbledore did to you.”

“Yeah, but still. I made decisions that should have been yours.”

I exhale fiercely.

“Okay, yes. You did. And yes, I was pissed off about it because it was a shitty thing to do. But Harry, you’ve apologised and promised you’ll never do it again, and I do actually trust you. You obviously understand why it was a crap thing to do. Dumbledore never did. He just carried on doing it over and over again. You’re not going to.”

Harry’s eyes are looking wet again. I realise that I don’t think I’ve ever seen him cry.

“Thanks,” he says hoarsely. “I’m definitely going to stop doing it.”

We sit there in silence, leaning on each other. My head’s on his shoulder, and his is resting against mine, and our hands are intertwined, our legs pressing together. After a long time, Harry sits up again and smiles at me, a brighter, more open smile than the ones that came before, and I find myself smiling back.

“Thanks Ginny,” he says. “I… I’m not really great at talking about, you know, feelings and stuff. But I’m really glad we had this conversation. I feel much better for telling you, and… and… I’m so glad you told me, ‘cause… ‘cause it means I can… you know… be better.”

He’s a bit red in the face by the time he gets to the end of his speech, but I feel quite ludicrously happy.

“I’m really glad too,” I say, grinning at him. “I was honestly terrified to tell you how I felt, but now we’ve talked it all feels so much better, you know?”

I lean in again and kiss him. His lips are soft and warm, just as I remember them. When I pull back, he swallows.

“Does this mean…?”

“Yeah,” I say. “I really, really want to get back together with you.”

And this time his smile is like the sunshine.


End file.
